As datacenters have increased in size and complexity, so has the need for datacenter-wide environmental monitoring. The increased size of datacenters has brought with it an increase in the complexity of the interaction of environmental parameters affecting the operation of equipment within the datacenters. This sometimes results in complex patterns related to environmental conditions that are not easily predicted or monitored. An example of a parameter that can be difficult to monitor is the heat distribution throughout the datacenter. In large datacenters that use under-the-floor cold air distribution predicting and monitoring the heat load produced by the equipment can be difficult. Changes in heat loading or airflow in just one small area of the datacenter can significantly affect the distribution and flow of air and heat for the entire datacenter. Many other physical and electrical environmental factors (e.g., humidity and power consumption) are also similarly impacted by the size and complexity of today's datacenters.
In order to more accurately track changes in the operating environment of datacenter equipment, datacenter operators have increasingly turned to the use of monitoring sensors and appliances. These devices are installed in the datacenter (within or external to the equipment racks) and provide measured values for a wide variety of physical and electrical environmental parameters within the datacenter. The data provided by such devices may be monitored and displayed either by existing network monitoring software (e.g., HP 0PENVIEVV® by HEWLETT-PACKARD®) or by other dedicated and/or proprietary software designed to work with specific sensors and/or appliances. The data collected is used by the monitoring software to display instantaneous and/or 2-dimensional trend data, and is sometimes used to trigger alarm and/or event notifications if one or more threshold values are exceeded by a monitored parameter. The data presented to operators reflects individual measurements and trends, but may not be very useful to operators in identifying and/or predicting in real-time the types of large scale environmental trends or issues that operators are likely to encounter in today's larger and more complex datacenters. Further, the large number of measurements that need to be monitored in a large datacenter may rapidly subject operators to information overload, creating a substantial risk that an impending or actual failure will go unnoticed.
Other software packages are capable of providing datacenter environmental modeling (e.g., RACKWISE™by VISUAL NETWORK DESIGN), but such software packages are limited to providing generalized calculated environmental predictions (e.g., total power consumption and total required cooling) based on models of the equipment within the datacenter. Still other general purpose fluid/thermal modeling software packages provide 3-dimensional modeling and display of fluid/thermal flows (e.g., FLOW-3D® by FLOW SCIENCE), but these packages are limited to providing theoretical projections of general parameters such as, for example, air flow and temperature variations.